Mental Health and Sickness
Until all the important papers are available here it will be difficult to see just what was achieved at the fifth International Congress on Mental Health, which came to an end last Satur- day. But the reports from Toronto seem to indicate clearly enough that the swing of opinion continues away from the former preoccupation with sickness towards a greater emphasis on health. The further this goes the more will the World Federation for Mental Health live up to its title. In this branch of medicine as in others prevention is more important than cure. Here, too, there are signs that a good deal of re- thinking has been going on and that the old obsession with child psychology is to some extent losing its hold. Dr. Hilda Burch, of New York, for example, suggested that it was time to leave mother and child alone, and that some of the tests commonly used by psychiatrists do, in fact, more harm than good. There was of course much discussion of the troubles that arise from environment; and the director of the Jewish Board of Guardians in New York suggested that the cause of most of the juvenile delinquency in the United States might be found in the fact that out of a total of forty-five million children, twelve million were not living with both their natural parents. But even as this was being discussed in Toronto, so it was being discovered in New York that the young authors of some of the most revolting crimes of violence which have recently swept the city come from perfectly normal homeS•
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